During the previous funding period, we have continued to recruit at the NIH clinical center, a cohort of disseminated cryptococcosis in otherwise symptomatically healthy individuals. We have thus far recruited 12 patients and have begun immunological and genetic characterizations. In a second cohort of candidemia patients we have identified a key genetic locus associated with poor outcome and have obtained a mouse knockout strain and are conducting backcrossing experiments to more rigorously test and validate the genetic associations found in the clinical outcomes trial. In addition, we have received 90 C. neoformans strains from our collaborator, T. Harrison and have begun processing them to perform RNAseq analysis to identify novel cryptococal genes involved in poor outcome of cryptococcosis in African patients. We have also initiated a collaborative epidemiology study of cryptococcosis in the US with B. Prevots of LCID.